It may be time to throw a new another risk into the mix for consideration.An economic attack. Lets call this one the side coin peg in a fiat hole.

If there is a peg and scBTC and BTC have the same price in fiat in the minds of people. What happens when we use altcoin economics for the classic pump scenario.This is where you use a third asset to do a circular round trip.

For example:Say I have 10 BTC and they are worth 100 each, I convert to scBTC, then sell the scBTC for $100USD each, then buy more BTC with the $1000, but there were no sellers so maybe I pay 101 each. No problem, I will be able to sell the scBTC at 101 now too, so I do it and do this repeatedly.

In this scheme, there will be only BTC buying with the fiat at exchanges. No BTC is sold to the market. Only scBTC is sold to the market but people believe the notion of the peg so they pay the same for them as they would for BTC (because after all they can be redeemed for BTC with only a 100 block delay in spend-ability).

Endgame is there are a lot of the scBTC created, reducing BTC liquidity and pumping the BTC fiat price... until it unwinds.

It may be time to throw a new another risk into the mix for consideration.An economic attack. Lets call this one the side coin peg in a fiat hole.

If there is a peg and scBTC and BTC have the same price in fiat in the minds of people. What happens when we use altcoin economics for the classic pump scenario.This is where you use a third asset to do a circular round trip.

For example:Say I have 10 BTC and they are worth 100 each, I convert to scBTC, then sell the scBTC for $100USD each, then buy more BTC with the $1000, but there were no sellers so maybe I pay 101 each. No problem, I will be able to sell the scBTC at 101 now too, so I do it and do this repeatedly.

In this scheme, there will be only BTC buying with the fiat at exchanges. No BTC is sold to the market. Only scBTC is sold to the market but people believe the notion of the peg so they pay the same for them as they would for BTC (because after all they can be redeemed for BTC with only a 100 block delay in spend-ability).

Endgame is there are a lot of the scBTC created, reducing BTC liquidity and pumping the BTC fiat price... until it unwinds.

There is no peg.There is no spoon.

i've already went thru that one early on in the 200 pgs +. but i lol'd at the name reminded me of a billiard shot.

but i here ya and i expect you to be trolled hard as i was for that one.

Thank you for making my point! You are exactly what I was looking for. A living example of someone who would be willing to trade scBTC for Truthcoin! And they said it won't happen

Answer: it might not be a scam! But if successful it will be inflationary to the Bitcoin system. And if inflationary to the system it will eventually destroy Bitcoin according to the great link I put up earlier about merge mining about currency competition .

I'm sorry but you have sorely misunderstood the gist of the comment in the link you posted. Worse, you mistakingly figured it would support your arguments.

Merged-mining, the way it was described in this comment, is essentally supporting multiple competing currencies : altcoins

Now sidechains, as I hope you have come to understand from our discussions, do not enable altcoins in any significant way.

The primary use case of sidechains is not to bootstrap altcoins on top of them.

In fact, to most of the Blockstream developers (from comments read), this mere notion is absurd. Sidechains were not created to "go to war & destroy" altcoins as you might like to think. In reality, altcoins are simply made irrelevant.

While you seem to have problem with "devs dev-ing" this is what they do : use technology to improve processes. Did the Blockstream guys dislike scammy alts? Of course, everyone does. Did they find important to leverage altcoins' innovation to improve the Bitcoin ecosystem? My opinion is this is the idea here.

Quote

At any given time there is a certain amount of demand for a Bitcoin like currency to make transactions. That need doesn’t increase with more competition. That means that the transactional demand for Bitcoin is really the same as the transactional demand for all substantially similar forms of payment. As more currencies are competing to fill the same demand they actually reduce the demand for the other currencies as they become more widely used.

This theory is blatantly ignorant of network effect. This is another reason why I found it strange for you to pull this one up from the 2012 cementary where it belong.. You do realize this guy is the 2012 version of you Essentially, his proposition is that because of merged-mining, Bitcoins' competing currencies will leverage the security of the network and create a race to the bottom for the most "cost-effective" currency.

Well it's been almost 3 years now and there has been no sign of his theory being proven right. Additionally, Bitcoin's network effect has been growing along, making it even less probable.

"I believe this will be the ultimate fate of Bitcoin, to be the "high-powered money" that serves as a reserve currency for banks that issue their own digital cash." Hal Finney, Dec. 2010

It may be time to throw a new another risk into the mix for consideration.An economic attack. Lets call this one the side coin peg in a fiat hole.

If there is a peg and scBTC and BTC have the same price in fiat in the minds of people. What happens when we use altcoin economics for the classic pump scenario.This is where you use a third asset to do a circular round trip.

For example:Say I have 10 BTC and they are worth 100 each, I convert to scBTC, then sell the scBTC for $100USD each, then buy more BTC with the $1000, but there were no sellers so maybe I pay 101 each. No problem, I will be able to sell the scBTC at 101 now too, so I do it and do this repeatedly.

In this scheme, there will be only BTC buying with the fiat at exchanges. No BTC is sold to the market. Only scBTC is sold to the market but people believe the notion of the peg so they pay the same for them as they would for BTC (because after all they can be redeemed for BTC with only a 100 block delay in spend-ability).

Endgame is there are a lot of the scBTC created, reducing BTC liquidity and pumping the BTC fiat price... until it unwinds.

There is no peg.There is no spoon.

i've already went thru that one early on in the 200 pgs +. but i lol'd at the name reminded me of a billiard shot.

but i here ya and i expect you to be trolled hard as i was for that one.

I really do not know what is rationale of this debate.1) SCs exist2) SC will existSC is not somehing new or something what can be destroyed.

Only new thing is a change in Bitcoin protocol. Support to verify new dynamic-membership multi-party signature (or DMMS) at protocol level.

In this scheme, there will be only BTC buying with the fiat at exchanges. No BTC is sold to the market. Only scBTC is sold to the market but people believe the notion of the peg so they pay the same for them as they would for BTC (because after all they can be redeemed for BTC with only a 100 block delay in spend-ability).

Endgame is there are a lot of the scBTC created, reducing BTC liquidity and pumping the BTC fiat price... until it unwinds.

There is no peg.There is no spoon.

Here is what I believe to be the flaw in your scenario :

If, as you say, people believe in the peg (which they absolutely should) then they will not buy your scBTC. In reality, the market has no incentive to purchase your scBTC over BTC if they are the same price.

The reason for this? Well you have suggested it yourself : the "block delay in spend-ability". What makes the best money? The most cost effective and versatile exchangeable asset. BTC is more easily exchangeable with fiat (because of liquidity) and other scBTCs than scBTC is and is also more cost-effective at doing so. No matter the 1:1 fiat peg, BTC is a more desirable unit than scBTC. BTC has better fungibility and liquidity in the economy than scBTC.

"I believe this will be the ultimate fate of Bitcoin, to be the "high-powered money" that serves as a reserve currency for banks that issue their own digital cash." Hal Finney, Dec. 2010

In this scheme, there will be only BTC buying with the fiat at exchanges. No BTC is sold to the market. Only scBTC is sold to the market but people believe the notion of the peg so they pay the same for them as they would for BTC (because after all they can be redeemed for BTC with only a 100 block delay in spend-ability).

Endgame is there are a lot of the scBTC created, reducing BTC liquidity and pumping the BTC fiat price... until it unwinds.

There is no peg.There is no spoon.

Here is what I believe to be the flaw in your scenario :

If, as you say, people believe in the peg (which they absolutely should) then they will not buy your scBTC. In reality, the market has no incentive to purchase your scBTC over BTC if they are the same price.

The reason for this? Well you have suggested it yourself : the "block delay in spend-ability". What makes the best money? The most cost effective and versatile exchangeable asset. BTC is more easily exchangeable with fiat (because of liquidity) and other scBTCs than scBTC is and is also more cost-effective at doing so. No matter the 1:1 fiat peg, BTC is a more desirable unit than scBTC. BTC has better fungibility and liquidity in the economy than scBTC.

Here is where you are flatly wrong. There clearly is an incentive, the time incentive.To change BTC to scBTC, you will have to wait for 100 blocks or so, whatever the confirmation time may be.If you buy them at exchange, there is no wait.

This confirmation exchange value is created in both ways in the transaction. People will pay a premium for time, localbitcoin pricing is evidence enough of this.

The liquidity is the ease with which you can part with your money. In the conversion from sidecoin to bitcoin, even if it is full reserve, there will be some resistance, some has talked about a delay of 2 days. It has to be at least the sum of the confirmation times of each chain. Therefore the sidecoins will have some less liquidity (it goes both ways, but since bitcoin starts out with the best liquidity, it is a problem for the sidecoin). The result is that the sidecoin usage can reach some level due to added functionality, but the lower liquidity, which should normally give it a lower value, will, with the pegging presumption, give it a lower usage. Some sidecoins will exist because they are practical, but they will not take off.

This is a very good explanation of why NL's speculative attack is not plausible although I disagree with you end argument that "utility" sidechains cannot take off.

Lower usage (than BTC) does not necessarily translate in no usage at all. That said, this effectively support Adrian's comments that SC with biggest network will discourage use of similarly featured/competing clones.

"I believe this will be the ultimate fate of Bitcoin, to be the "high-powered money" that serves as a reserve currency for banks that issue their own digital cash." Hal Finney, Dec. 2010

It may be time to throw a new another risk into the mix for consideration.An economic attack. Lets call this one the side coin peg in a fiat hole.

If there is a peg and scBTC and BTC have the same price in fiat in the minds of people. What happens when we use altcoin economics for the classic pump scenario.This is where you use a third asset to do a circular round trip.

For example:Say I have 10 BTC and they are worth 100 each, I convert to scBTC, then sell the scBTC for $100USD each, then buy more BTC with the $1000, but there were no sellers so maybe I pay 101 each. No problem, I will be able to sell the scBTC at 101 now too, so I do it and do this repeatedly.

In this scheme, there will be only BTC buying with the fiat at exchanges. No BTC is sold to the market. Only scBTC is sold to the market but people believe the notion of the peg so they pay the same for them as they would for BTC (because after all they can be redeemed for BTC with only a 100 block delay in spend-ability).

Endgame is there are a lot of the scBTC created, reducing BTC liquidity and pumping the BTC fiat price... until it unwinds.

There is no peg.There is no spoon.

i've already went thru that one early on in the 200 pgs +. but i lol'd at the name reminded me of a billiard shot.

but i here ya and i expect you to be trolled hard as i was for that one.

True, apologies for taking some of your well deserved heat from this. I went for the meme-combo of billiards, and square peg round hole to resurrect this one because I didn't think it was adequately resolved.And the recently revisited topic of the misuse of economic terms in the new whitepaper was brought up. That is bound to create more confusion than it resolves.

The liquidity is the ease with which you can part with your money. In the conversion from sidecoin to bitcoin, even if it is full reserve, there will be some resistance, some has talked about a delay of 2 days. It has to be at least the sum of the confirmation times of each chain. Therefore the sidecoins will have some less liquidity (it goes both ways, but since bitcoin starts out with the best liquidity, it is a problem for the sidecoin). The result is that the sidecoin usage can reach some level due to added functionality, but the lower liquidity, which should normally give it a lower value, will, with the pegging presumption, give it a lower usage. Some sidecoins will exist because they are practical, but they will not take off.

This is a very good explanation of why NL's speculative attack is not plausible although I disagree with you end argument that "utility" sidechains cannot take off.

Lower usage (than BTC) does not necessarily translate in no usage at all. That said, this effectively support Adrian's comments that SC with biggest network will discourage use of similarly featured/competing clones.

This is rather a good explanation of what makes it plausible instead of not plausible.The time has market value, confirmed scBTC are worth more than the newly created ones awaiting confirmation.If I want to get scBTC right away without having to wait for confirmations, I could get them through exchange rather than SPV conversion, and could expect to pay some small premium for that.

Thank you for making my point! You are exactly what I was looking for. A living example of someone who would be willing to trade scBTC for Truthcoin! And they said it won't happen

Answer: it might not be a scam! But if successful it will be inflationary to the Bitcoin system. And if inflationary to the system it will eventually destroy Bitcoin according to the great link I put up earlier about merge mining about currency competition .

I'm sorry but you have sorely misunderstood the gist of the comment in the link you posted. Worse, you mistakingly figured it would support your arguments.

lol, you love to try and say i'm wrong even when i'm right; as you admit below, i correctly understood what the guy is saying but since you think he is wrong, somehow i am wrong also simply b/c it disagrees with your view dude, you're fouling me even when i'm nowhere close to receiving a pass!

Quote

Merged-mining, the way it was described in this comment, is essentally supporting multiple competing currencies : altcoins

Now sidechains, as I hope you have come to understand from our discussions, do not enable altcoins in any significant way.

not only are all sorts of altcoin Sidescams going to bolt themselves onto the Bitcoin MC as shown by Truthcoin but as odalv has shown even Silk Road 4.0. How do you explain that to the Feds?

Why do you think Truthcoin is a scam? I would love to see a decentralized prediction market.

Quote

The primary use case of sidechains is not to bootstrap altcoins on top of them.

you won't be able to control this anymore than you already have

Quote

In fact, to most of the Blockstream developers (from comments read), this mere notion is absurd. Sidechains were not created to "go to war & destroy" altcoins as you might like to think. In reality, altcoins are simply made irrelevant.

While you seem to have problem with "devs dev-ing" this is what they do : use technology to improve processes. Did the Blockstream guys dislike scammy alts? Of course, everyone does. Did they find important to leverage altcoins' innovation to improve the Bitcoin ecosystem? My opinion is this is the idea here.

Of course, “developing your own cryptosystem” is the purview of only cranks and researchers, so it was reasonably assumed that none of these “altcoins”, as they were called, could ever be plausibly presented for public use. Boy, were we ever wrong on that one....If you are, or are planning to, develop and release an “altcoin” to the public, this document reminds you that you are playing with fire. This sort of behavior was cute on sci.crypt, a community populated mainly by cryptographic experts where there was no risk that your charlatanism would be mistaken for anything legitimate, and where there was no ability to store value in your scheme anyway....The Bitcoin community differs in both those respects. Your crankery is not cute. You are not a cryptographer, and yet are releasing a homebrew cryptosystem, misrepresenting your own qualifications, and encouraging others to store value in your creation. These actions are incompetent, dishonest and reprehensibly dangerous.

lol.

That's Andrew Poelstra's "A Treatise on Altcoins". He's even harsher than many of us in this thread! He's also listed as an author on the sidechains whitepaper.

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Quote

At any given time there is a certain amount of demand for a Bitcoin like currency to make transactions. That need doesn’t increase with more competition. That means that the transactional demand for Bitcoin is really the same as the transactional demand for all substantially similar forms of payment. As more currencies are competing to fill the same demand they actually reduce the demand for the other currencies as they become more widely used.

This theory is blatantly ignorant of network effect. This is another reason why I found it strange for you to pull this one up from the 2012 cementary where it belong.. You do realize this guy is the 2012 version of you Essentially, his proposition is that because of merged-mining, Bitcoins' competing currencies will leverage the security of the network and create a race to the bottom for the most "cost-effective" currency.

Well it's been almost 3 years now and there has been no sign of his theory being proven right. Additionally, Bitcoin's network effect has been growing along, making it even less probable.

you just fouled out.

the reason it hasn't happened is b/c the only coin that has been MM'd on top of Bitcoin has been Namecoin out of public service. so no, the guys conclusions are not wrong or invalidated. btw, that's dooglus aka Chris Moore, a very talented Bitcoin early adopter who if you take the time to look is a MAJOR contributor #8 in reputation, right up there behind Pieter Wiullie, in total rankings to Bitcoin Stack Exchange and our understanding of what Bitcoin is, so fuck off:

Quote from: dooglus

Basically the idea is that you assemble a Namecoin block and hash it, and then insert that hash into a Bitcoin block. Now when you solve the Bitcoin block at a difficulty level greater to or equal to the Namecoin difficulty level, it will be proof that that amount of work has been done for the Namecoin block. The Namecoin protocol has been altered to accept a Bitcoin block (solved at or above the Namecoin difficulty level) containing a hash of a Namecoin block as proof of work for the Namecoin block. The Bitcoin block will only be acceptable to the Bitcoin network if it is at the difficulty of the Bitcoin network.

The Bitcoin block chain gets a single extra hash when a merged mining block is accepted, and the Namecoin block chain gets a little bit more (because it includes the Bitcoin block) when a merged mining block is accepted. However, because of the Merkle Tree, the entire Bitcoin block doesn’t need to be included in the Namecoin tree, just the top level hashes (so the extra bloat to the Namecoin chain is not a big problem).

Since you make more money mining both Namecoins and Bitcoins miners will eventually all do merged mining, and the difficulty level for all block chains will eventually be the same.

Furthermore, the economic incentive to mine will be the combined economic incentive of all networks, making all networks more secure. Of course this allows competing networks (with different inflation rates) to quickly become secure. This subjects Bitcoin to more competition.

Ultimately the value of Bitcoin is a reflection of the need for Bitcoins to make exchanges. The more people using Bitcoin to make purchases, the more demand there is for Bitcoins, and the higher the price of Bitcoins goes. (Speculation also raises the price, but long term speculation is essentially a bet that the transactional demand for Bitcoin will increase in the future.) The higher the price, the higher the incentive to mine.

At any given time there is a certain amount of demand for a Bitcoin like currency to make transactions. That need doesn’t increase with more competition. That means that the transactional demand for Bitcoin is really the same as the transactional demand for all substantially similar forms of payment. As more currencies are competing to fill the same demand they actually reduce the demand for the other currencies as they become more widely used.

This means that ultimately, to the extent that currencies are interchangeable to end users, merged mining does not increase the overall security of the networks. The demand for currencies drives the price (and thus the value of the reward). Increased demand for any given currency results in decreased demand for others, lowering the incentive to mine for the other currencies. The total incentive is a function of total demand for all Bitcoin like currencies.

Except now competing currencies can market themselves as “as secure as Bitcoin but with lower transaction fees.” In other words there is a race to the bottom among competing currencies to offer the lowest transaction fees, because lowering the transaction fee doesn’t hurt the security of the network in comparison to the other merged mining networks. Users, following their own self interest, will adopt the currency with the lowest transaction fees as long as it has the same security of the competitors.

This will increase the price of the currency with the lowest transaction fee (because demand for the currency is higher), and decrease the price of the currencies with higher transactions fees (because demand for those currencies is dropping as it is being filled by demand for the competing currency). Because the currencies with the higher transaction fees were the ones generating the incentive to mine, overall incentive to mine will diminish. As long as a currency’s mining is merged with the freeloading currency, it will be powerless to increase incentives by imposing mandatory transaction fees.

The result will be a decrease in mining incentive, a decrease in mining, and ultimately all networks that allow merged mining will become insecure.

Here is where you are flatly wrong. There clearly is an incentive, the time incentive.To change BTC to scBTC, you will have to wait for 100 blocks or so, whatever the confirmation time may be.If you buy them at exchange, there is no wait.

This confirmation exchange value is created in both ways in the transaction. People will pay a premium for time, localbitcoin pricing is evidence enough of this.

But you are assuming that there is an incremental demand for the scBTC, whatever its utility is. This is not necessarily the case.

You need someone to buy all those scBTC you want to dump for fiat.

Since BTC & scBTC price are correlated one does not need to buy scBTC to "ride your pump"

"I believe this will be the ultimate fate of Bitcoin, to be the "high-powered money" that serves as a reserve currency for banks that issue their own digital cash." Hal Finney, Dec. 2010

Here is where you are flatly wrong. There clearly is an incentive, the time incentive.To change BTC to scBTC, you will have to wait for 100 blocks or so, whatever the confirmation time may be.If you buy them at exchange, there is no wait.

This confirmation exchange value is created in both ways in the transaction. People will pay a premium for time, localbitcoin pricing is evidence enough of this.

But you are assuming that there is an incremental demand for the scBTC, whatever its utility is. This is not necessarily the case.

You need someone to buy all those scBTC you want to dump for fiat.

Since BTC & scBTC price are correlated one does not need to buy scBTC to "ride your pump"

So is there a peg or not?Is it just "correlated" now?

Let's assume the SC has some feature or other, faster, more private, whatever it is doesn't matter, we can pick whichever one is most successful and has the most liquidity at the moment to take advantage of the time premium and do this.

The liquidity is the ease with which you can part with your money. In the conversion from sidecoin to bitcoin, even if it is full reserve, there will be some resistance, some has talked about a delay of 2 days. It has to be at least the sum of the confirmation times of each chain. Therefore the sidecoins will have some less liquidity (it goes both ways, but since bitcoin starts out with the best liquidity, it is a problem for the sidecoin). The result is that the sidecoin usage can reach some level due to added functionality, but the lower liquidity, which should normally give it a lower value, will, with the pegging presumption, give it a lower usage. Some sidecoins will exist because they are practical, but they will not take off.

This is a very good explanation of why NL's speculative attack is not plausible although I disagree with you end argument that "utility" sidechains cannot take off.

Lower usage (than BTC) does not necessarily translate in no usage at all. That said, this effectively support Adrian's comments that SC with biggest network will discourage use of similarly featured/competing clones.

Granted, but by taking off I mean taking over, because with money there is a tendency for all or nothing. By the way, with sidecoins I mean this time the same as your scBTC.

not only are all sorts of altcoin Sidescams going to bolt themselves onto the Bitcoin MC as shown by Truthcoin but as odalv has shown even Silk Road 4.0. How do you explain that to the Feds?

I sincerely hope this was a joke. A very bad one at that.

again, no substance or imagination from you!:

Oh, I see. Laying prostrate before the Feds and explaining everything that is remotely associated with Bitcoin is a sufficiently imaginative strategy then?

I'll set my mind to imagining how that strategy will end up...thinking...Got it: 'Poorly'.

Say, you didn't get hooked up with CoinValidation with the expectation that your stash would be perma-cleared or something did you? I know we've been through this before, but I cannot shake the whiff of something stinky going down here. Sorry to ask.